Search age:

Search in:

From Best to hearse

Anson Cameron

DEAR Ben, given that I know you, as most people do, only from your work on the strange oval playing fields you Aussies use. And more recently from the impish snatches on the nightly news that, pieced together, make you look like Johnny Depp hip-deep in another Hunter S. Thompson project - stylish and having raffish fun on the far side of respectability and the law.

And given that the George Best I sold the world was made of those same raffish media-bites, (''I spent 90 per cent of my money on wine, whisky and women; the rest I wasted.'' Beat that for a throwaway line, Ben.)

And given my life was delivered to the world in the same predictable instalments as yours, leading to tears in the final act, well … I thought I'd write you a letter to offer some directions along the low road.

Now don't go kidding yourself asking, ''Who's George Best and what would he know?'' You're strictly B-Grade, kid. I was a way bigger star than you in a way bigger game and my self-destruction was a bigger entertainment to a lot more people. You're just me off-Broadway, son. But you've stepped in my every footprint so far. So I assume I'll meet you soon.

Advertisement

Firstly, let me counsel you about the public, who you seem to think can be bought with a wink and who you seem to imagine are barracking for your rehabilitation and redemption. Well, no, son. The public is a little more divided in its thoughts and desires on wayward sporting gods than it will publicly express. A goodly percentage of the public want you punished with death, and are waiting for the inevitable instalment in this drama that ends with you on a trolley under a sheet on the six o'clock news.

It will satisfy their sense of biblical justice and it will give them a chance to immerse themselves in the great spiritual satisfaction of grieving while not having to part with someone they love, or even care about.

The death of someone you know in a vicarious soap-character way can be such sweet sorrow. And you're only an actor to them, Ben. Believe me, they can't tell the difference between you, me, Macbeth or Omar. (Yeah, there's TV down here.) My god, I remember they wept with such dire pleasure at my memorials I only wished I could have charged them for the thrill.

Your death will be as beautifully sad as the death of Little Nell. As Dickens drew her closer, episode-by-episode, to a sticky end, the world couldn't watch, and couldn't look away. When liners docked in New York people ashore shouted, ''Is Little Nell dead yet?'' Yes, the public knows when it is owed a death. And you've led them a merry dance, Ben.

They figure they're owed now.

But, Ben, along the way to this final instalment can I ask you to stop smiling and being so damned stoic and … and … ripped? At least I had the decency to grow a potbelly. Did you ever think the spring in your step and your red-carpet grin and your stay-cool-I've-got-this covered wink might be giving a certain type of susceptible young dude the idea that you are indeed, getting away with it?

Might be allowing them to believe that despite the shit called down upon you by suits and pontificators … Ben's living the life. Still cut, suntanned, smiling, riding a high and tossing winks. You and I, Ben, we know that smile is a mask for a smorgasbord of purgatory. Jesus, I lived in a hell fronted by perfect teeth for decades. But the young don't know.

So maybe you'd be doing a public service by letting the agony show. Maybe if you stripped off and spent an afternoon screeching like a cheated baboon atop a Kombi van in Hay Street pelting old ladies with faeces it would be instructive to the young and something of a watershed in the war on drugs.

I also was treated as a demigod and given the keys to many cities and hearts. And I know it turns a man into Idi Amin pretty sharpish. Yeah, I began to cannibalise my friends and destroy my family, too. I've had time to think about it and I think the lust for oblivion comes from not quite believing you're the Great Man the world says you are. From having to live up to that call, knowing it's a lie … until the drugs kick in.

Anyways, lad, I didn't pen this little missive just to show off my personal growth or to accuse you of being Idi Amin. It's just I detected a kindred spirit and wanted to offer the one insight that came to me too late, but might have made a difference.

See, the thing I didn't know, right through the destruction of my own liver and then a second liver that I purchased and also destroyed, was that I wasn't just tipping the booze into myself. I thought it was a private matter. But as it turns out what I was doing, every time I lifted the pint to my lips, was pouring it down the throats of the people I loved.

I thought booze was a solo drunk and you seem to think meth is a solo high. But we are conjoined, me and my family, you and yours. We are all joined at the hip, liver and heart. And when you go down, Ben, you'll take 'em all with you. I suppose most of your family have realised by now, as mine did, that their hearts are fastened to a dying animal, in the words of W. B. Yeats. Not the baby, though. He won't know of the pain that awaits him yet, eh?

My final message, famously, as the cameramen hovered at bedside and the obituarists reached for sporting analogies was, ''Don't die like me.'' Ambiguous last words, but I was confused at the time. I'd like to clear them up for you now. I didn't mean, ''I died. Don't you die, too.'' That would have been foolish. We die, of course. I meant there are different ways to die. And if you are lucky enough to get to choose between a squalid death that engulfs and defeats your family, and one that doesn't, then be a hero and choose the one that doesn't. Save them. I didn't. You might.